A favor owed, a hunt like no other.
A courier for the shadow world no more, Aileen’s former protection is gone. Alone but still defiant, she survives one night at a time. Sure, working a dead-end job isn’t part of every young vampire’s dreams, but it pays the bills.
When the darkly seductive Liam calls in a favor, she’ll find her carefully constructed world tilting on its axis as he draws her into a dangerous game against a wily enemy. The High Fey – creatures as powerful and beautiful as they are deadly – have come to town, their motivations unclear as lines are drawn and shadowy alliances made.
And with them, they bring their Wild Hunt where everyone is either predator or prey. Betrayed and marked as its quarry, Aileen will find surviving until dawn has never been this hard.
The only thing that might save her – are the vampires she doesn’t trust.
I read the first three books in this series, ‘Shadow’s Messenger’ (2016), ‘Midnight’s Emissary’ (2017) and Moonlight’s Ambassador’ (2018) and then took a break. I’m glad I finally got back to this series about Aileen Travers, an ex-soldier who was turned into a vampire against her will and who is so angry about it that she refuses to obey any of the rules (and there are lots of rules, including spending your first century as a vampire in service to your sire and their clan).
‘Dawn’s Envoy’ immediately pulled me back into Aileen’s world with an exciting plot about evil fae and the Wild Hunt that moved the development of Aileen’s character and the story arc of the series forward. To survive the situation Aileen found herself in, she had to draw on the relationships she’s built with non-vampire supernaturals and find a way to work with the vampire clan she’s been trying to stay out of since the series began. I was glad it also finally got beyond the unresolved sexual tension between Aileen and the vampire clan enforcer. The will-they-won’t-they thing was becoming tiresome; I was pleased to see that the outcome was more ambiguous and more problematic than the typical enemies-to-lovers Urban Fantasy trope.
I enjoy T.A: Whites’ writing. She delivered snappy dialogue, snarky interior monologues, vivid visualisations of the magic systems at play, just enough humour to lubricate the plot without detracting from the excitement of the life-threatening conflicts or the anxiety of the many layers of deception and betrayal.
I’m back into this series now. I’m planning on pulling ‘Twilight’s Herald’ (2020) to the top of my TBR pile soon.
Natasha Soudek does a good job as the narrator. I understand why she makes Aileen’s delivery so slow, but I still ended up listening to sections of the book at 1.5x normal speed. Click on the YouTube link below to hear a sample.
